Temple. [TEMP·əl, noun/adj.] A building devoted to the worship of God—or gods, or other honored things and beings.
I mentioned last week the church is not temple. I’m gonna have to clarify what I mean by that statement. It was correctly pointed out to me we Christians are, collectively, the temple of the Holy Spirit. (1Co 3.16) So it’s a pretty basic syllogism:
The church is all Christians, together.
All Christians, together, are the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore the church is the temple of the Holy Spirit.
But there’s a flaw in this syllogism.
Yes, we Christians are definitely the temple of the Spirit. We’re devoted to the worship of God. But is that only what we’re called to do? No; Jesus said the most important commands are to love God, and love one’s neighbor. (Mt 22.37-40) The temple was not created for the purpose of loving one’s neighbor, but for interacting with God. The church, on the other hand, was created for the purpose of interacting with both God and fellow Christians. So “temple of the Holy Spirit” is an incomplete definition of church.
If you want to reduce it to formulas, here you go.
church > temple of Holy Spirit
We’re not just the temple of the Holy Spirit. We’re more.
More than the temple.
As you recall, the ancient Hebrews were family: They were descendants of Abraham and Jacob; their tribes were named for Jacob’s sons, their ancestors. They all followed God together—well, they were meant to, though some did better than others. They were meant to be one another’s support system.
That wasn’t the case in Jesus’s day. At that point, Israel was part of the Roman Empire. The Jews were divided into sects: Pharisees, Sadducees, other minor sects, and folks whom the Pharisees called “people of the earth”—in essence, pagans who believed in God, but didn’t follow him in any organized way. Since Jesus’s followers were a minority in the larger Jewish community—and in the larger Greek communities, the larger Roman communities, and pretty much wherever Christians found themselves—he created the church as a mutual support system. It took the place of the larger Jewish community.
But, as you notice, the community wasn’t the temple. And the temple wasn’t community. People went to temple, not to interact with others, but with God. (Ex 29.42) Yes, worshipers might encounter other worshipers, but that wasn’t the point. Your offerings were made on your behalf, and maybe your family’s behalf. Once a year the head priest would make an offering on the nation’s behalf. Otherwise it was all individual: It was you and God.
There’s nothing at all wrong with individually worshiping God. There’s nothing wrong with me-and-God time, me-and-God activities, and worshiping by oneself. Jesus encouraged private prayer, (Mt 6.5-6) and frequently went off by himself to pray. Worship, and most forms of worship, doesn’t require a community to interact with. We can do it by ourselves.
Of course, that’s one of the arguments some people make against going to church: “I can worship God all by myself. I don’t need to go to church to pray with others, sing with others, study the bible with others, and otherwise worship. It’s just me and God.” And they’re correct. You don’t need other Christians for most forms of worship.
But you do need the community, the family, the support system, and the interaction. You can’t practice sacraments by yourself. You can’t grow in fruit of the Spirit—in love, peace, patience, etc.—without other people to love, to have peace with, to practice patience with; and Christians ought to be easier to practice this fruit upon than pagans. (I know, sometimes we’re not.)
Some forms of worship, when done in the group, give that worship a greater depth. When Christians sing or pray together, and agree on what we’re singing or praying, it pleases God, who likes the harmony. When we disagree, but we sort it out, that pleases God, who likes the forgiveness and faithfulness and unity. And he interacts with our interaction. (Mt 18.20)
We do temple stuff.
The church has taken on many aspects of temple. We kinda had to, after the temple of the LORD was destroyed in the year 70. Since then, there’s been no singular place on the planet for the LORD’s rituals to be performed. Christians rightly recognize they can be performed pretty much any place we gather together as church.
So when we do, we treat our meeting-place like temple. Not precisely like the temple of the LORD, as outlined in the Law, because Jesus’s sacrifice fulfilled a lot of those functions. But we worship God together. We sing to him. We pray together to him. We perform our rituals—some sacred, like communion; some less sacred, like karaoke special music. It varies from church to church.
Many Christians teach the church actually is God’s replacement for the temple of the LORD. God, they say, did away with the temple because he didn’t need or want it anymore. This is why Jesus prophesied its destruction, (Mk 13.2) and why Stephen was so dismissive of buildings constructed by human hands. (Ac 7.48-50) These Christians teach God simply had enough of the hypocrisy and heresy and false religion, of people turning his house of prayer into a den of thieves, (Mk 11.17) of the sacrificial system, of everything. Jesus had done away with the sacrifices anyway, and had transplanted the whole kit ’n caboodle to heaven. (He 10.8-22) So God made his church the temple of the Holy Spirit—then gave the Jews a few decades to repent, and finally sent the Romans in to crucify the lot of them and rip the temple down.
Yeah, there are problems with this teaching. Part of it is correct; part definitely isn’t. Most of the Christians who teach the church is God’s replacement temple, tend to teach the only function of the church is the function of temple: Worship. We gather together to worship God, and that’s all. As for interacting with one another, and growing together as family—well, that’s nice, and they’re sure there are some verses in the bible that suggest the idea, but they don’t care so much about them. They just wanna worship. After all, don’t the psalms tell us to come to God’s house and worship him there? Indeed they do. But recognize the psalms were referring to temple, not to church. Just because we often call our church buildings “the house of God” doesn’t mean they’re the same as what the writers of the bible were talking about.
The other problem is the animosity towards the Jews throughout it—or even the animosity towards the temple of the LORD. Certainly that’s not correct. God was pleased with his temple. God is pleased by his loyal followers. He didn’t despise these things and want them gone; he had a greater idea in mind for them: He wanted his loyal followers to be his temple. As Jesus prophesied:
The time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem. … But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way. For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. —Jesus, John 4.21, 23-24 NLT
Just as the sacrifices were fulfilled by Jesus, the temple is fulfilled by the church. We carry the Holy Spirit with us. We don’t need to go somewhere specific to interact with God. Wherever a Christian is, God can be contacted. And worshiped. We can do this anywhere. Everywhere.
But again, the church is not just temple. We’re community. We’re called to interact with one another. So we do. And together, we function as God’s temple, and worship him jointly as well as apart.